Build a platform for dental professionals working in Singapore
Desmond Goh is a General Dental Surgeon, gradudated from the Faculty of Dentistry, National University of Singapore. He has seen many problems in the dentistry in 9 years working as a dentist. Hospitals, institutions, academies, suppliers, etc organizing the CDE events for dental professionals have to market it individually and reach out to dental professionals individually via hardcopy brochures, emails, cold calls, cold sales visits etc.
Also, dental professionals and dental auxiliaries have to wait for monthly Classified listings issued by SDA to seek for jobs. It has been an irritation and a waste of resource in the field. Desmond became the first one coming up with an idea: A marketplace for dentists including CDE Events Sign Up recently in a bid to help overcome the problems.
In Singapore, a dentist must possess a license regulated by Singapore Dental Council (SDC) to practice dentistry and a license regulated by the Ministry of Health Singapore (MOH) to operate a dental clinic.
The market of Singapore dentistry is USD $24M a year generating by at least 688 clinics. These clinics are spending USD$2,064,000 a month on dental supplies. Despite the robust growth, the whole industry still operates things in a traditional way. Changing the long-term habits and optimizing the dentistry operations is really a challenge for Dental Marketplace.
Desmond deeply understand the problems and market. Building a good MVP re-organizing the CDE events in 4 months is a way to penetrate the market. This MVP is a good test for the market feedbacks. The product must be UX/UI friendly and make sense to the dental professionals who are familiar with the hardcopies, papers, documents for years.
To make sure the MVP works well and results with good market penetration, Desmond is in need of a partner with expertise in building fault-tolerance and scalable software, experienced in product-fit design and provide cost-efficient solution for start-up founders.
We backed up by skillful engineers, with the top-notch knowledge in Golang to carry out a steady and scalable backend system. Strictly followed the Agile practices, Scrum framework to iterate the product release and adapt to changes, Dwarves Foundation comes across as exactly what Desmond is seeking for.
Desmond and the Dwarves conducted the first step of partnership by understanding the market background, the problem it’s facing and the upcoming vision. After deciding to build an MVP that focuses on CDE events and covers on iOS, Android and web platforms, the team identified the core features and modules then listed out critical points in the system core to prepare for the architecting phase. We know the main problem in UX/UI design in Dental Marketplace is how to make it user-friendly and easy to use to change the habits of dental professionals. They went to Design Thinking Methodology and applied Design Sprint to tackle the unknown problems.
Find out more of their UI/UX design
Dwarves Foundation sketched up the architecture of the system, user flows & diagrams before choosing the tech stack to continue the work. In order to optimize the event registration and transaction process, they picked out Golang as the primary language for backend system, then formed up a team of experienced engineers in ReactJS, Swift, Kotlin and QA working closely with Desmond and his product guy.
Desmond's office is 1 hour different from the Dwarves Foundation team so we setup an overlapping working hour with him
The first version of the MVP was launched after 12 weeks of hard work. Dental Marketplace generated more than $50,000 in revenue, connected 563 dental professionals and 302 events were brought online.
Dental Marketplace was developed for responsiveness on various screen sizes, which enables its user to access from different types of device. The backend system is also well-craft for processing data-sensitive on payment transactions and ready-for microservices extendable. By coming to this stage, Desmond has solved his very first issue from day one: Build a playground for dental professionals, connect them by a mutual understanding and address them with different needs.
“It was hard for me to change Singapore dentistry market. But after working with Dwarves Foundation to release the MVP and getting traction, I believe the Dental Marketplace would make the dental professionals work much easier. Dwarves Foundation provided high-quality design work, from gathering information and requirements to delivering the product, were easy to work with, every our question and feedback was explained and resolved well. They are a dedicated team of geeks and skillful engineers in Asia working together with me to shift the product-fit to the market”
Desmond GohFounder & CEO of Dental Marketplace